Saturday, January 23, 2010

How To Store Cooked Rice Correctly To Avoid Food Poisoning

If you think cooked rice cannot give you food poisoning, you are totally wrong. Rice has spores of bacteria Bacillus cereus. This bacteria remain dormant in rice, and will get active if rice is added heat and water.

After cooking, the rice will cool down and this phase allows spores of Bacillus cereus to grow, producing toxin. If you reheat the rice, it can kill the bacteria, but the toxin remains in the cooked rice.

So if you cook rice, store what you don't eat in a container and put inside the fridge after the rice is not steaming anymore. You can keep this cooked rice in fridge for 3 days.

But if you let the cooked rice out of fridge and stay in room temperature for more than 4 hours, you should throw this rice away as it is no longer safe and can cause food poisoning.

Raw vegetables and spices also might contain this bacteria. So do the same thing to your curries.